


San Juan

by ignipes



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-12
Updated: 2006-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-07 05:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he woke up Sam was gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	San Juan

He's been awake for seventy hours.

The window is down and the air is hot, a furnace or a breath from hell, buffeting his face and filling the car with a steady roar. His eyes begin to water thirty miles north of Mexican Hat. He takes a swig from a paper cup; the coffee is lukewarm, bitter, speckled with dust. A ham sandwich wrapped in plastic sits untouched on the seat, beside the gun, the knife, the phone that hasn't made a sound in three days.

He's been awake for seventy hours. He has no fucking idea where Sam is.

~

He slept for six hours, dead to the world, and when he woke up Sam was gone.

There was blood on the pillow on Sam's bed; the chain on the door was broken. The bitch in the office yelled at Dean about the damage until he shoved her against the wall and -- quietly, calmly, a cool whisper she couldn't help but hear -- asked again whether she'd seen or heard anything out of the ordinary last night.

She swore she hadn't, nothing at all. He believed her.

He told her to charge the broken chain to the credit card.

~

His sunglasses broke three hundred miles ago, and he can't see anything except glare and glimmer, sunlight and dust. The road is paved but rough and pockmarked; he can feel the car lurching and vibrating through the steering wheel, through his fingers and aching hands, along the length of his tired arms.

He's been following a trail of stolen cars and swapped license plates through nine states.

Four miles from the highway to the end of the road. There's a postcard on the dashboard: meandering river, unfamiliar handwriting.

It's a wild guess, but it's the last wild guess he has.

~

They never found her body.

"Don't look so disappointed," Sam said, shaking his head in amusement. "I'm sure we'll find something else to burn."

She wasn't anything special, almost a cliché: hot twenty-something outdoorsy chick vanished while on vacation, last seen wearing hiking boots and khaki shorts and smiling at a camera that was later found in a pawnshop in Flagstaff.

"Do you ever think about it?" Sam asked one night, on an empty stretch of highway. "Why some people come back and others don't?"

Friends said she'd been a firecracker in life, a real live pistol.

"No," Dean said.

~

One thousand feet down to the river.

"Sam?"

He scuffs his shoes on the gravel, doesn't try to sneak up.

"Hey, Sammy. This is where she died, right?"

Sam finally looks around, squinting in the low afternoon sun, the desert wind messing up his hair. "Yes."

Dean takes another step closer. "Are you--"

"Do you ever think about it?" Sam doesn't sound possessed, only sad, tired. "That there are some ghosts we'll never -- some that will never let go?"

Nothing to salt, nothing to burn, nothing except an empty desert and a slow river.

Dean says, "Yeah. Sometimes."

~

The sun sets, lights the hills and cliffs with red and yellow flames. They're sitting on the flat ground above the canyon, wrapped in desert silence.

"You could have told me," Dean snaps. He doesn't want to sound angry, but from the way Sam flinches he knows he doesn't quite manage. "Did you even try? To leave a message, some kind of trail?"

"Dean, she wasn't trying to hurt me."

"You don't know that."

"Yeah, I do." Sam leans back on his elbows. "She only wanted to come back here."

"Well," Dean says after a moment, "_I_ didn't know that."

~

The sun is below the horizon; a cool wind is whispering around them.

Sam lies back and closes his eyes. Dean sits with his arms hooked around his knees and watches Sam for a while, searching for scrapes and bruises, any sign of harm. He looks as tired as Dean feels, but it's nothing that a bed and a shower and a few square meals can't fix.

Satisfied, Dean turns back toward the river, hidden in shadow at the bottom of the twisting canyon.

Sam's voice startles him. "I knew you'd find me."

"Lucky guess," Dean replies, but he smiles.


End file.
